How to write, talk and communicate with your donors

Donor retention

If you’re an Aussie, the plight of our dairy farmers has been big news over the last few weeks. Here is one of the many articles about it.

The Australian public responded, trying to buy locally produced, non-Coles or non-Woolworths milk. My Facebook feed (and probably yours) has been filled with people trying to work out which brands of milk and dairy products to buy that will help Australian dairy farmers.

In the midst of all this, the following post caught my eye. This is an example of an almost perfect thank you letter in social media format. Although it’s ...

A client asked me last week whether you need to send your donors a thank you letter after EVERY donation they send in. Because the donor admin department doesn’t want to send gift acknowledgements and thank you letters after each gift. “It’s much more efficient to just send one annual statement at the end of the financial year. We save money and it’s much less hassle.” So let’s think about this. ...

I was initially outraged by this case. But it highlighted some important questions about donor relationships.

If you keep up-to-date on non-profit news then you’ll probably be aware of a $24.6 million settlement involving a US veterans charity and their fundraisers.

You can read about it here and here. But it basically involves the charity paying lots of money to its fundraisers and never getting an acceptable return on that investment. The upshot is that very little of the funds raised ever went to veterans.

(Experienced fundraisers know that you often lose money on acquisition of new donors ...

Last week I called a client to clarify something about an upcoming tax appeal. During the conversation, he informed me a major donor had just made a gift of $200,000 to the current appeal we had worked on together.

This gift, he said, had the office high-fiving and whooping with joy. I have to admit I, too, was very excited for them.

This $200,000 windfall represented a significant proportion of the income budgeted for the year for this charity. In other words, they’re not a multi-million-dollar non-profit.

BUT… I wanted to point out a few lessons about this particular gift. ...

In discussions about donor nurture and retention, the concept of the donor journey inevitably comes up.

The “traditional” donor journey is often couched in terms of the donor pyramid. That concept of acquiring donors then thanking and welcoming them. Trying to get second gifts. Then getting higher gifts or converting them to monthly giving. Then eventually turning them into major donors or bequestors.

Of course, not every donor follows this exact path. But the general idea is that you try to move donors from their first, often modest, gifts up the donor pyramid to bequests.